


Prickles and Plastic: A Fairy Tale

by Brumeier



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inanimate Objects, Bad Weather, Community: ushobwri, First Meetings, Friendship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24395512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brumeier/pseuds/Brumeier
Summary: When a plastic bag meets a barbed wire fence, the unexpected occurs.
Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Comments: 30
Kudos: 67





	Prickles and Plastic: A Fairy Tale

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [ushobwri](https://ushobwri.dreamwidth.org/2020/05/04/) New Frontiers challenge. My new frontier? Never having written my characters as inanimate objects.

Once upon a time there was a very sleek plastic bag named John. 

He came from a specialty store so, where most of his kind were white or blue or gray, he was black. John strutted his stuff all the way from the store to the house, before he was ignominiously stuffed into a cloth sack with other, lesser bags.

John didn’t appreciate life in the sack. The other bags mostly dozed, waiting to be repurposed, but John remembered how it felt to be out there in the sun, his plastic rippling in the breeze. He kept shifting, trying to make his way back to the top of the sack.

And one day he did.

John dropped to the floor, too balled-up for anything more graceful. He stretched, crinkling, until he got the attention of the cat. Some well-timed and strategically placed crinkles got John to the back door, which the kids had left open. He stretched all the way open and caught the next breeze that blew by.

John was free!

He rode the air currents, tumbling and blowing away from the house and out into the world. Sometimes he slowly rolled down a sidewalk, other times he’d get caught in the updraft of a passing car and catch some really good air. There were lots of green spaces to see, farms with cows and chickens and horses, and gently rounded mountains full of trees.

One day the breeze blew John into a field and he found himself caught up on a rusty barbed wire fence, a twisted metal barb hooked through one of John’s handles.

“Hey! Get off!” the fence snapped.

“Then let go,” John replied. 

“You’re the one holding on to _me_.”

John did his best to get free of the barb, but nothing worked. It was hooked through near the handle seam and wouldn’t budge, and John didn’t want to try and move the other way and end up splitting himself open. A hole in his side would mean he wouldn’t be able to catch the air and get the height he needed to fly.

“Looks like we’re stuck together, buddy.”

“It’s Rodney, not ‘buddy’, and just because you’re here doesn’t mean I have to talk to you.”

And he didn’t, not for an entire day. 

John, stuck in place, grew quickly bored. So he crinkled his sides and hummed all the Johnny Cash songs he knew. And then started over again when he ran through them, until finally Rodney broke his vow of silence.

“Do you need to be so insufferable?”

“Nothing else to do,” John pointed out.

“What are you even doing here?” Rodney asked. “Shouldn’t you be in a landfill somewhere?”

“Some of us like to think outside the confines of our manufactured forms,” John replied loftily.

The wire he was attached to vibrated, probably with outrage, and Rodney stopped talking again. For five whole minutes.

“I don’t need any company,” he said testily. “I find the solitude helps stimulate my mental processes.”

He sounded defensive, and John suspected the opposite was true. Rodney was stuck in place – literally – and the field he was surrounding was overgrown. He hadn’t even had the company of livestock in who knew how long.

“What does a barbed wire fence have to think about?”

“Look up, you brainless bit of plastic. You see all that sky? That’s where life started, and where these idiot humans will eventually go when they’re done destroying things down here. A whole universe filled with wonders.”

Rodney expounded on that for the rest of the night, rhapsodizing about nebulas and black holes and the mathematical language of the universe, and by the time the sun came up he and John were well on their way to becoming friends.

John shared all his experiences since escaping the sack, and Rodney talked about the glory days when his field was full of horses and the people who cared for them. John tried to explain what it was like to catch a strong breeze and sail through the air, and Rodney did his best to express how the vast night sky over his field made him feel.

They were really settling in together when the big storm rolled in.

The sky steadily darkened, the wind picked up, and fat drops of rain started to fall. John, who’d been so happy just bobbing around in the world, found he was now reluctant to leave.

“You should go,” Rodney said glumly. “You could travel really far in this weather.”

John really could, and with the way the wind was blowing, he’d be free of that barb in no time. But if he left, Rodney would be alone again, standing sentinel over his empty field and dreaming about a place he could never go.

“We haven’t finished talking about the universe,” John said. 

Thunder rumbled and the skies opened for real, rain coming down in sideways sheets because of the wind. John could feel himself pulling away, and he didn’t have the strength to hold on.

“You want to stay?” Rodney sounded uncertain and hopeful, all at once.

“I wish I could,” John replied. And he really did.

The wire went surprisingly slack for a moment, then it seemed to surge up and suddenly barbs were catching John in three different spots and curling inward, holding him tightly in place. Before meeting Rodney, John would’ve found that intolerable. 

Now it felt like he was where he needed to be.

They rode out the storm together, the first of many, and as John turned sun-bleached and gray, he and Rodney found a whole universe of things to talk about and experiences to imagine.

It was the happiest ending a plastic bag and a barbed wire fence could hope for.

**Author's Note:**

>  **AN:** So, okay. I was driving home from work one day last year, and I saw a plastic bag blowing across the street. Nothing odd about that, since no matter where you go people seem to like littering. But for some reason that day, I thought about John. And saw that the bag was heading for a barbed wire fence. Who’s pricklier than barbed wire? Rodney! So the idea for this fic was born then, but I never did anything with it. When the New Frontiers challenge popped up, this seemed perfect because I’ve never written characters as inanimate objects. And probably never will again. LOL!


End file.
